The 4th Annual SPRINT-TB Symposium featuring local and international experts on research and clinical aspects of TB disease will be held at the National University of Singapore on Thursday 15 November 2018.

For additional details, and registration, please visit our symposium website at ​http://www.tuberculosis.sg/

​​In November 2017, the TRUNCATE-TB trial was selected for mention in “Global Investments in Tuberculosis Research and Development: Past, Present, and Future”, a policy paper prepared for the first WHO Global Ministerial Conference on Ending Tuberculosis in the Sustainable Development Era in Moscow, Russia ​
​(apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/259412/1/9789241513326-eng.pdf)

 ​Patient compliance is essential for TB treatment success, but it is challenging to sustain for the whole six month duration of the treatment. Current means of ensuring the adherence is Directly Observed Therapy (DOT), where patients need to report daily to a clinic and take their medication under direct observation of a healthcare worker. This may be inconvenient and costly to patients and also strain the resources of national TB control programmes.
As an alternative patient-centered approach, SPRINT-TB Theme 4 has developed MIST (Mobile Interactive Supervised Therapy), a platform for smartphone-based treatment supervision to enhance TB treatment regimen adherence. It enables patients to submit videos of themselves taking pills, thereby removing the need for them to attend the DOT clinic in person.
MIST has been tested with healthy volunteers and found to be acceptable and effective in supporting adherence to pill taking (published in BMJ Open in December 2016). The study will further expand to the countries in the region to test the approach in TB patients.

In August 2016, selected SPINT-TB drug development projects were added to the TB Drug Pipeline report maintained by Working Group on New TB Drugs. Working Group on New Drugs (WGND) is one of the Stop TB Partnership's seven Working Groups - a network of experts committed to accelerating the development of effective and affordable new therapies for TB. The WGND acts as a forum to facilitate global collaborations and joint projects for the development of new TB drugs and promotes coordination of all stakeholders in this process.

View WGND TB drug pipeline at http://www.newtbdrugs.org .

On March 24 every year, World Tuberculosis Day is commemorated around the globe. This year the Straits Times marked the day with an article by Assistant Professor Mishal S. Khan, lead of SPRINT-TB Theme 4. Dr. Khan outlined the TB incidence situation around the world, remarked on the rise of multi-drug resistant TB and elaborated on Singapore's unique position to lead TB fighting efforts in Asia, where nearly 60% of the world's TB cases are found.
Read the full article in the Mar 24, 2026 issue of the Straits Timess: "Singapore in a prime position to lead fight against tuberculosis".

SPRINT-TB was featured in this month's issue of Medicine (a publication by NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine). Read the feature "Running Against Resistance: the SPRINT-TB Research Programme" in Issue 17, Feb2016 here.

We are pleased to announce the release of SPRINT-TB Annual Report 2015 - the first in the series of reports the programme will publish annually to inform the scientific and broader community of its activities, news and discoveries.

SPRINT-TB programme officially commenced in July 2014 and in slightly over a year of its existence has produced an array of research findings and achievements. Notable highlights in the first year of SPRINT-TB's formal existence include identification by Theme 1 of potent activity of bortezomib against a new target M. tuberculosis. In Theme 2, work has started on finding the derivatives of bortezomib that may have greater selectivity in killing bacteria with minimal toxicity.Theme 3 has established a platform for testing new drugs and combinations in humans - the whole blood bactericidal activity assay - and modified this to be able to test drugs that work against bacteria, as well as that modify the host immune response. Theme 4 has set up a collaborative effort in TB health services research with the national TB programme in Cambodia and opened the SPRINT-TB office in Phnom Penh.
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SPRINT-TB Annual Report 2015 is available for download here.

In the 2015 Report on Tuberculosis Research Funding Trends released in November 2015 by TAG (Treatment Action Group), Singapore was reported to have spent more on TB R&D in 2014 as a percentage of its GDP than any other country or economy. Appearing in this report for the first time, Singapore gave USD 8.1 million to TB research in 2014, ranking higher than the much larger countries (and economies) of France, Switzerland, Australia, and Canada. The whole reported TB funding amount (USD 8.1 million) was awarded to SPRINT-TB, a TB research programme based in National University of Singapore.

The report points out that this can make a meaningful difference in TB R&D. Given the small base of available TB funding worldwide, an organization only needs to allocate more than USD 12 million per year to rank among the top 10 funders of TB R&D. Singapore thus has a tremendous potential to take a worldwide leadership position in TB R&D with SPRINT-TB as its flagship research programme.

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TAG (Treatment Action Group) is an independent non-profit think tank of science-based treatment activists based in New York City, USA, which supports research to end tuberculosis epidemics. The Report on Tuberculosis Research Funding Trends, funded by the Stop TB Partnership, is published annually at the Union World Conference on Lung Health. The purpose of the report is to track TB research spending against the targets established by the Stop TB Partnership's Global Plan to Stop TB, 2011–2016. 

TAG 2015 Report on Tuberculosis Research Funding Trends is available here.

SPRINT-TB Director Prof. Nicholas Paton was interviewed by the press in the official openning of the A*STAR-NUS Clinical Imaging Research Centre (CIRC) on November 11, 2015.

CIRC, located in the National University of Singapore, is the first in South-East Asia to use MR/PET scanner technology, or magnetic resonance (MR) imaging-compatible positron emission tomographic (PET) technology. The scanner combines two powerful imaging techniques to conduct a more precise examination compared to other techniques, such as a CT scan.

SPRINT-TB collaborates with CIRC in an array of TB clinical imaging studies under Theme 3. Speaking at the opening ceremony, Prof. Paton remarked that CIRC's state-of-the-art facilities provide unparalleled opportunities to advance TB research and monitor the response to treatment with more precision.

The news story was features by Channel NewsAsia and Today.